Coleridge's Progress to Christianity: Experience and Authority in Religious Faith

by Ronald C. Wendling

Wendling, Ronald C.

266 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1995

About the author

Although I left the religious order of the Roman Catholic Church known as the Jesuits, I still regard the order and its spirituality as a "treasure," though one I found "unsuitable" to me. Hence the title of my memoir.

I graduated from a Jesuit high school in Buffalo, New York and entered the Jesuits when I was only seventeen, too young to make a decision about how to spend the rest of my life. I also had to grapple with my father's addiction to alcohol, from which he recovered when I was about twelve, and with the brute fact of his death when he was only forty-six, and I only nineteen.

It took me nine years in a Jesuit seminary to discover that a life requiring me to live out a vow of chastity was not for me. My story tells how I discovered this fact about who I was and found my true vocation as a teacher of English Literature, a path the Jesuits set me on.

I am now retired from my career as a teacher and literary scholar and live near Philadelphia with my wife of nearly fifty years, my two married daughters living close by. I spend my summers in the Endless Mountains of Northeast Pennsylvania, and I enjoy reviewing books of contemporary interest and blogging as well.